As the Midnight Oil - Little Feat transition took place it was time for a decision. Hang around in the middle distance or head for the front? No-brainer, really. Off we went. Madam’s lack of height means she’s fairly adept at worming her way through crowds and while we didn’t end up right in the front row we were only two or three rows back when Little Feat hit an Australian stage for the first time in twenty-six years.
If you’re interested, there are reminiscences on the actual show on a separate page, but when the set finished the bloke standing next to me expressed disappointment that the band hadn’t played Dixie Chicken.
Maybe in the encore, I suggested, and the suggestion was right on the money. Over the previous couple of years I’d picked up a number of Feat live recordings and almost invariably Dixie Chicken appeared somewhere in the set-list, so it wasn’t really all that hard to predict, but the half-hour version that took the band up to the curfew featured an arrangement I hadn’t heard before.
But after that heapin’ helpin’ of Chicken there were matters that needed to be addressed, and most of them involved gaining access to the accommodation since there were only two sets of keys and we didn’t have either of them. Working on the principle that Marcel or Tony might have made their way to the agreed rendezvous by this stage we headed back to the sound-board.
On arriving there, with no sign of the others, I turned my attention to Jerry Manuel, who’d been looking after the sound mix. Inquiries revealed that:
(a) The people we were looking for were backstage (as suspected);
(b) Jerry couldn’t get us back there since he was still engaged in breaking things down, but;
(c) SkinDoc, who’d watched the set from the sound-board while taping the performance, was headed that way and could get us where we needed to go.